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FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

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Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#31

Post by Jaruzel »

Theodores wrote: post #15

This product seems to be more about sending a file to another FAX machine that accepts files, presumably so you didn't have to own a MODEM. They got this wrong. In the days when FAX was used for things like sending purchase orders, what was needed was a means of putting a file on a floppy, walking to the FAX machine, then sending off a 'PDF' from there, removing the need to print out the form first. Faxes were still…

In Some places 'eFAX' is still a thing, where the staff members can email a PDF (or Word doc etc.) to @ and it gets sent out of the building as a FAX over POTS. For incoming FAXs, users register their email address against a phone number or extension, and get incoming faxes as PDFs in their inboxes.

For regulatory compliance reasons these systems are still in place in large banks, insurance firms, and law firms.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#32

Post by tyingq »

boomlinde wrote: post #26
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #18

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot. More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that…

A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.

The 6502 in the later 1571 drive ran twice as fast as the C64's CPU.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#33

Post by tomjen3 »

Jaruzel wrote: post #31
Theodores wrote: post #15

This product seems to be more about sending a file to another FAX machine that accepts files, presumably so you didn't have to own a MODEM. They got this wrong. In the days when FAX was used for things like sending purchase orders, what was needed was a means of putting a file on a floppy, walking to the FAX machine, then sending off a 'PDF' from there, removing the need to print out the form first. Faxes were still…

In Some places 'eFAX' is still a thing, where the staff members can email a PDF (or Word doc etc.) to @ and it gets sent out of the building as a FAX over POTS. For incoming FAXs, users register their email address against a phone number or extension, and get incoming faxes as PDFs in their inboxes. For regulatory compliance reasons these systems are still in place in large banks, insurance firms, and law firms.

It amuses me greatly to imagine companies sending e-mails to fax to a fax machine which sends them to a fax that then emails the recipient the "fax"...

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#34

Post by FraaJad »

foone wrote: post #8
XVar wrote: post #6

Ah the "what should have been a blog post as a series of 50 tweets" format, not my favourite publishing mechanism.

Sorry. I've got ADHD, so that's really the only way I can usually do these things. I'm planning to videoify it in the future, if that's more your style.

I like this format. There is always things like Thread Reader to read it "long format". Eg [1] is your thread in one page.

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1050258171317510144.html

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#35

Post by gandalfian »

kozak wrote: post #4

In 2018, transferring large files over the internet is still not exactly straightforward. Few years ago Skype was excellent for P2P transfers of very large files, but since then they removed this feature, and today Skype's file transfer limits are ridiculously low. Using Dropbox or Google Drive for that requires a pre-paid amount of cloud storage space: you can't really stream anything directly with any well-known wi…

https://xkcd.com/949/ Though between my family members teamviewer has a basic file transfer mode that works quite well, pc to pc, assuming both parties have it installed.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#36

Post by gandalfian »

I'm always surprised that cheap satellite text messaging has never become a thing. All these new cheaper satellites, you would think it would be the ideal low bandwidth application. But lower the prices and greater abundance never quite happened.

Somewhere in a box I still have a 802.11b wifi router with a built in 33.6kb dial up modem, which was the perfect thing at the time.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#37

Post by ihm »

kozak wrote: post #4

In 2018, transferring large files over the internet is still not exactly straightforward. Few years ago Skype was excellent for P2P transfers of very large files, but since then they removed this feature, and today Skype's file transfer limits are ridiculously low. Using Dropbox or Google Drive for that requires a pre-paid amount of cloud storage space: you can't really stream anything directly with any well-known wi…

There's https://file.pizza which uses WebRTC for an easy to use peer-to-peer transfer service.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#38

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

gambiting wrote: post #27
Luc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once it's set up https://syncthing.net/ works transparently. Just drop files into a designated folder and they'll magically appear on the corresponding folder on the other machine.

I think OP means sending files to someone over the internet. Like, if I wanted to send you, a complete stranger, something over the internet, then the options we could use are very limited. There's pretty much nothing that works on p2p basis, I'd have to upload it to something like google drive or mega first. Edit: Ok, I read a bit more about the thing that you sent and it looks like it does actually fulfil that part…

https://www.file.io/

This is a nice one, throw it up there and they give you a link, link works once.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#40

Post by a1369209993 »

gambiting wrote: post #27
Luc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once it's set up https://syncthing.net/ works transparently. Just drop files into a designated folder and they'll magically appear on the corresponding folder on the other machine.

I think OP means sending files to someone over the internet. Like, if I wanted to send you, a complete stranger, something over the internet, then the options we could use are very limited. There's pretty much nothing that works on p2p basis, I'd have to upload it to something like google drive or mega first. Edit: Ok, I read a bit more about the thing that you sent and it looks like it does actually fulfil that part…

1: Open your bittorrent client.

2: Select File>New, or "Create new torrent", or whatever.

3: Pick the desired source file.

4: Create the torrent (and open it and make sure the source file is in the destination folder if your client didn't do that on it's own (you want "download finished, seeding to 0 peers")).

5: Right click>copy magnet link, then paste into whereever.

6: Other person downloads the file just like with any other magnet link.

It's obnoxiously unergonomic and rather slow (especially if your clients have to track down each other's IP addresses via DHT), but it's not actually hard.

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